Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 74

Record label: Atlantic

Produced: Charles Koppelman and Don Rubin

Recorded: Gold Star Studio, Los Angeles; August 15, November 31 and October 1, 1966

Released: January 1967

Chart peaks: None (UK) 142 (US)

Personnel: Bobby Darin (v); no other musicians credited

Track listing: If I Were A Carpenter (S); Reason To Believe; Sittin’ Here Lovin’ You (S); Misty Roses; Until It’s Time For You To Go; For Baby; The Girl That Stood Beside Me (S); Red Balloon; Amy; Don’t Make Promises; Day Dream

Running time: 26.03

Current CD: Not currently available

Further listening: The 4-CD As Long As I’m Singing: The Bobby Darin Collection (1998)

Further reading: Roman Candle: The Life Of Bobby Darin (David Evanier, 2004); www.bobbydarin.net

Download: Not currently legally available

Darin had one of rock’n’roll’s most unfathomable careers. Listen to the records he made across a career cut short at the age of only 37 (he died of a heart attack in December 1973) and you have almost no clues to the man’s identity. There are undoubted classic moments; his own Dream Lover (1959) is one of the era’s classic teen ballads. But just a year later he was the finger-clicking swinger behind Mack The Knife.

There’s some doubt, of course, that If I Were A Carpenter was truly Darin’s own brainchild. The album’s producers Charles Koppelman and Don Rubin brought the songs to the table, seven of which were by either Tim Hardin or John Sebastian, both of whom they also represented. Yet Darin was no stranger to folk or even folk rock. As early as 1963 he’d recorded the folk-based Earthy And Golden Folk Hits; James Burton, Jim McGuinn, Fred Neil and Phil Ochs allegedly attended the sessions. Darin was also the first to perform Dylan songs at Las Vegas around this time (a dubious honour, perhaps). But whatever the motives, If I Were A Carpenter and the similar Inside Out, which followed a few months later, are stylistic triumphs.

Darin recorded If I Were A Carpenter as a single in August 1966. Hardin’s own released version would not appear for over a year, but his arrangement is clearly what Darin’s treatment was based upon. Hardin complained bitterly that Darin had completely copied his phrasing. Susan Moore (Hardin’s wife) later recalled: ‘Tim and I were out driving when it came on the radio. I thought it was him, it was so close. The brakes screeched. The door slammed. And Tim was stomping on the side of the road, screaming and swearing.’ Would Hardin’s own version have met with the same success? Somehow it’s doubtful.

There’s further irony that Tim Hardin’s only US chart hit (Number 50 in 1969) was Simple Song Of Freedom – penned by Bobby Darin. But 1967 was the last year that Bobby Darin himself was to grace the charts.